Vanskyor Karrade
by CarterMacGyver
Summary: an OC who is born into the world of Star Wars. A young woman who is different and who must create a path for herself. with some help of course. ONESHOT


Disclaimer: I do not own anything Star Wars related. I only own Vanskyor, but that is all.

A/N: this is kinda of NJO related, but I am putting it hear because it had more to do with the books than the movies and there is no general Star Wars books category. Any way, I would greatly appreciate reviews, they make my day so much better. Enjoy!

Vanskyor Karrade

Talon Karrade was in no way Force-sensitive, he was a genius however. A genius at getting people to buy and trade, a genius at knowing more than anyone else. But even with the galaxy embroiled in a civil war, he appeared to care only about trade. Talon Karrade was a man who would sell guns to both the Empire and the Rebellion. He made money off other peoples politics, and he was good at it.

But the one thing that so many didn't know about the man who ran the largest smuggling operation in the galaxy and controlled more and more of the underworld with each year, was that his wife was a Rebel.

A member of Rouge Squadron.

A hero.

A Force-sensitive.

Most dismissed the baby who had played on his ships and in his offices on whichever planet he was currently based on. The baby who was doomed to only a few memories of her mother. But despite how Talon Karrade felt about the politics of the world, he understood his daughter had literary been born in the middle of those politics.

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Katana Imgi-Karrade had known from the moment that she was pregnant that her baby was in grave danger. True, Katana was a member of Rouge Squadron and until Wedge, or the medics, told her that she couldn't, she would continue her duties as a member of Rouge. But when she realized that the Final Big Battle at Endor was going down in her 9th month, she really started to worry.

That worry intensified when she was stuck on board a medical ship during the attack, and the not-yet complete Death Star began using its planet-destroying beam to target ships. Mainly other medical ships. When her labor started early, it was only the beginning of the final month after all, she began to panic. She'd had only a small amount of training, she'd been one of the very lucky children who had escaped the purge and had known had understood what they were, or at least what they were meant to be. But she was no Jedi, not like Skywalker was, but it was still all too easy for her to sense _him_, the Emperor, the evil one who had haunted her dreams as a child. And she knew he could sense her, and her baby. Her baby who would be too young to protect herself.

The moment her baby girl was born, Katana felt the Emperor die. But his spirit had felt the new life, the new life his spirit could overtake, and in that moment, Katana Imgi-Karrade used her abilities consciously for the first time since she was the youngest child-learner in the Jedi Temple. Instinctively, she shielded her newborn baby from the mental barrage, and in that desperate moment, the youngest of the Jedi Temple survivors protected and provided the newest young potential Jedi with the same protection she had once received from a perceptive older student who had listened to the Force that dark night and spirited away as many of his fellow students as possible before falling prey to Lord Vader.

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Three year old Jafiera Karrade understood many things. Her memory was absolutely perfect, it was in fact holographic, and this enabled her to concentrate on understanding without having to struggle to remember. But as she listened to her father tell her the news, that Mother was gone, had died at a place called Borelias, she didn't understand why she had already known this fact.

He told her that it had happened five days before, that her mother, who had switched to Intelligence when Jafiera was born, had been on a ship that was to land as part of the Rebel invasion and projected occupation of the planet. But that things had gone wrong, the Rebels were repelled and her mother's ship had been destroyed.

But Jafiera had known this five days before. Just like she had known that even though her mother was sad for leaving her behind, at least Katana Imgi-Karrade had died surrounded by Rouge Squadron, even though that battle was an unmitigated disaster for the new reformed Rouges as well as for the small smuggler family. But the three year old who knew nothing of what the Force was didn't understand how she could know these things. But despite her lack f understanding, she accepted that these things that she seemed to know without any prompting were in fact true. So she accepted that she knew when ships were coming out of hyperspace, and how the people around her felt at any given moment. And she accepted that neither she nor her father were actually supposed to know that her mother died at a place called Borelias, she knew without a doubt, that officially they were only to know that she had died, in battle, and that many people missed and had loved her mother.

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Her mother had not been gone more than six months when Jafiera met the Rouges for the first time. She had accepted Booster as an "uncle" after all she had many of those, but it was when she listened as he explained that he was looking for weapons and supplies for the Rouges, for a man named Wedge Antilles, that she began to pay attention. That name, Wedge, it was a name she knew. The small toddler remembered her mother telling her about him, about how he was a good friend and wanted to help people, and how he had lost his parents when he was young. But she also knew him in the way that she never attempted to explain, she simply understood that this man whose name she remembered her mother telling her, was going to be important in her life. When she heard Booster complaining about a man named Corran Horn and heard her father tease Booster about this man, Jafiera also knew him. She had never heard his name, but she knew that he was seeking something, closure and perhaps revenge, and she knew he would be as important in her life as Wedge Antilles.

In the next months, the small but oddly articulate toddler argued with her father as much as she dared, there were limits to his patience with her, and she was always conscious of those limits. But that didn't stop her from pushing them and push them she did, with her insistence that he help the Rouges, even help them at an economic loss for himself and the fledgling organization. She was vaguely aware that he had taken over other organizations, including a very large and important one, but he had a partner now, to merge together the two, and it was fragile. If he had thought to ask her Jafiera would have told him that his partner would betray him and that the organization would survive. Would survive and thrive. But he didn't think to ask her things like that. What he knew and understood of her abilities, he trained as best he could and he used. Her innate sense of when ships were coming out of hyperspace was too good not to use, and he taught her as best he could to tell what kind of ships were arriving. But she in return pushed him. The fledgling Republic and especially the Rouges fascinated her. And her instance on helping them became his way of teaching her how to argue effectively and how to get people to do what she wanted them too, and give her what she wanted.

When Mara Jade come into their lives, Jafiera was instantly aware that this was a person like her. A person who knew things and understood things that weren't normal, things that didn't make sense. But it was not that fact that drew the four year old to the red-head. It was the fact that her father had relocated them to Mykr, and the absence of the knowing and the understanding was scarier to her than they had ever been before. The lack of a mother and the lack of friends, real friends, not her father's associates and underlings who liked to play with her because children's games are addictively fun or even because she wasn't really a child, more like a very small adult, drove her to want to bond with this woman who she knew was like her and was important, to everyone. Even if she was hurting and even if she didn't appear to like having a 4-year-old tailing after her all the time.

It was Mara who gave her the name that she felt was actually hers. Vanskyor, the same name as the species of wild hunters on Mykr. Her father had attempted to tame them, to create the perfect guards, the result was Drang and Strrum, her guards and friends. But they were not especially tame. They seemed to hate Mara, in fact only Jafiera knew the actual number of times they had attacked the woman who was slowly warming up to her. And it was Mara, who said that little Jafiera, the only one who could truly calm the animals, the little girl who seemed to understand them, was better called Vanskyor.

It would be years before she understood fully why this name was better for her. But it suited her, and was, she felt, a better name than Jafiera. Even if that was the name her mother had given her. After all her mother was a person she only had memories of, the woman named Katana Imgi Karrade was a ghost who the little girl didn't know, and understood that she never would.

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When little Vanskyor met Luke Skywalker, she was more sure of herself. She understood more about the Rebellion, the Republic, the Empire. She knew how to make money and keep her head in the dangerous game that was intergalactic smuggling. But she was also smugly aware of her safety. She knew her father's group was the largest, that he had the most power, and she knew that he had laid down certain rules.

Rules that stated that his family was off limits. That his organization was his family, and that taking potshots at any member of his family was to loose your life.

She knew these rules, and understood them perfectly. Even if she also knew that they were wrong in a way. The killing part, perhaps, but she was five and didn't bother with figuring out why her sixth sense was always jumpy about those rules.

It was Luke who she felt a kinship with, he was like her, and Mara. The only difference was that he would talk to her, even though he was in effect a prisoner of her father's. He told her things. The millions of things she had never asked before, about her mother and about the knowing, and why there was none on Mykr, and what was it like to fly an X-Wing, and had he ever flown the _Millennium Falcon_, and all sorts of nonsense things that five year olds ask and thousands more that they don't.

He was the first to tell her of the Force, and the Light Side and the Dark Side. He told her about Jedi and the ways they had helped people. He had explained to her the need to control her emotions, about why anger was bad and hate even worse, and why fear was a precursor to those.

It would be his words that she remembered when she sat in her cell on the _Chimera_, and it would be his words that she clung too as she attempted to save herself from the pain. She understood what Thrawn wanted, and she understood that Thrawn knew that she knew the address he wanted. But the one way she had of honoring her mother's memory was to not tell him. Even though he had started immediately to torture her. Even though people far older than herself had died resisting, or simply given in.

She refused. To tell or to die. And she did the one thing she could do, throw herself into the Force and hope that she wouldn't drown in its vast depths.

She nearly did.

It was Luke and Mara who saved her. They were also the ones who rescued her and her father from the cell block on the _Chimera_ but they were also the ones who saved her. They were the ones who found her small consciousness drowning in Force-sea that she had thrown herself into, it was they who pulled her from it, and it was they who held her comatose body when she was unable to come back to herself.

They were the ones who woke her up, well they and an abrupt reentry into the Shipyards, the sheer number of ships, jolted her back into consciousness. But in the end it was Luke and Mara who set the blocks in her mind, to keep back the new brimming power from overflowing, and to keep her sane.

It was they who understood why she had to go to the Katana Fleet herself, she didn't know whether or not it was funny that her dead mother shared a name with the fleet she had given so much of herself to protect.

It was they who helped her to understand why what she had done was probably not the smartest thing she could have done, but under the circumstances was the only option the 5-and-a-half-year-old had.

And it was they who she would come to call Dad and Mom. Her biological parents remaining Father and Mother, it was Luke and Mara who were with her at all the important major moments, and all the little moments in between. It was they who taught her to live without the Force, to fight and fly and exist without needing it all the time. It was they who helped her to understand that a smuggler could be a Jedi and a Jedi could be only 13 years old.

But then she had never been a child in the first place. Simply a small adult.

And it was they who taught her to stand up for herself, and to make sure that a promise was always kept.

And so in a way it was thanks to them that a 14 and a half year old became the youngest member ever of Rouge Squadron. Because she'd had the audacity to remind Wedge Antilles, a General by then, of a promise he had made to a 3 and a half year old. And it was she who had charmed the rest of the Rouges into accepting her. Expect Corran, because he already knew her from the Jedi Temple she had attended as infrequently as he and Mara.

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Talon Karrade was in no way Force-sensitive, he was a genius however. A genius at getting people to buy and trade, a genius at knowing more than anyone else. But even with the galaxy embroiled in a civil war, he appeared to care only about trade. Talon Karrade was a man who would sell guns to both the Empire and the Rebellion. He made money off other peoples politics, and he was good at it.

But the one thing that so many didn't know about the man who ran the largest smuggling operation in the galaxy and controlled more and more of the underworld with each year, was that his daughter was a Rebel.

A member of Rouge Squadron.

A hero.

A Force-sensitive.

Most had dismissed the baby who had played on his ships and in his offices on whichever planet he had been on at the time. The baby who was doomed to only a few memories of her mother. But despite how Talon Karrade felt about the politics of the world, he understood his daughter had literary been born in the middle of those politics.


End file.
